Sun has introduced the world's first tape kit to hold one terabyte of raw data, the StorageTek T10000B.
Sun's new T10000B tape drive can read and write existing T10000A tape media and also reformat it at the new, higher density. A library of T10000A media can, in theory, now hold the same information as before but on half the …

For 37G's can we get good software?

For something as important as backup's, why does enterprise backup software suck so incredibly much? It's the worst part of Enterprise computing. If I'm spending this much, can I get software worth a *&%$#*&$@#*%&$^@#&*$^@#$&%*@#?

Useless obsolete overpriced hardware

If that was 1 PB and not 1 TB I could understand the pricetag of $37,000; but with low-cost 1.5TB HDs available, I think that this kind of storage is way obsolete amd dead. For the same money one can buy - at retail prices - 150 1.5 Terabyte drives and that is 0.22 PB of reliable storage space. I have used tape backups before (10 years ago) and I can assure you that they were really TERRIBLE. Forget about that 600000ms access time, no use commenting on that; but what really turned me off was the high amount of unrecoverable errors that occurred even with relatively new tapes.

read the words....

@vincent himpe

Have you ever seen a tape library that can handle hot-swappable disk drives? I haven't. They're hardly likely to replace tape.

@AC

Of course your TS1120s exist, but they are ONLY 700GB native capacity with the extended capacity cartridges. Did you read the article? The new STK is 1TB native. No point comparing TS1120 compressed with these new drives uncompressed.

tapes are a bit safer in some ways

@etabeta

The appeal of tapes is that you can make offsite backups, and if the drive itself fails you can still recover the data on another drive. Hard discs are usually only the first choice of people/companies who have never experienced a disc failure. Hard discs can fail in spectacular and unexpected ways, even if they aren't being actively used, and recovering data from a damaged disc is usually a lost cause.

Tape versus HD

I recently did a stint at a very large hardware/services vendor, managing backups for a very very large Telco and I can tell you tape isn't dead.

As much as new hard drives are coming into the market, no enterprise would be caught dead storing long term data on a SATA hard disk. We were managing something around 30 silos per site, each with 6,400 tapes in it, a great many of which had to be stored offsite.

Until a) hard drives have the reliability of tapes (as said above, HDs can fail even when not in use) and b) there's realistic HARD DRIVE robots which can physically eject them and send them for storage, they're useless.

I can't imagine the man hours it would have required for a person to do all that tape swapping.

When you're pushing 60+ PB of data in a month, there is simply no better way of doing it than tape, and at that kind of level the companies involved REALLY don't give a toss about the cost of the operation. They need customer records and tax details RELIABLY kept for anywhere from 7 to 100 years.

Very funny if the drive is shot and you need to dismantle it to get the tape out. (I recently had to return a crapped out SDLT drive, and spent an hour to get the tape out. Left a note in the box about it, too. Don't care about 'no user serviceable parts' and 'do not open' stickers. My tape, my DATA. )

Enterprise backup systems sucks.

Disaster recovery functionality costs extra...

Weird, when it was included for free in IBM's Dualstore package for OS/2 waaay back when... (You had to make a couple of boot floppies for it, but still... )

And the question we all want answered

@Andrew Baines

@AC

"Of course your TS1120s exist, but they are ONLY 700GB native capacity with the extended capacity cartridges. Did you read the article? The new STK is 1TB native. No point comparing TS1120 compressed with these new drives uncompressed."

Check your facts... The TS1120 is 700GB *native* with newer cartridges, compression is on top of that and you'll usually get about 2TB on tape depending on the type of data. The older cartridges are 500GB native. Eg. database data will usually do 3:1 compression on these drives.

Why still invest in proprietary techno ?

Same thing as others, I can't see why SUN/STK still invest in a proprietary techno, which is only a couple of dozens of percent more capacitive than the widely deployed LTO4.

Back in 2000, 9840 and 9940 made sense since they were a lot better than LTO/DLT, but that is simply not true anymore.

Sure, raping captive customers recklessly with a whoping 37 kUSD per drive and who knows how much per tape (200 USD ?), is bringing some revenue, but I doubt it will work nowadays with so late new products (latest SL 3000 model) and their f***ing ACSLS in lieu of modern dual-path FC access.

As for disks vs. tapes, disks is just easier at the cost of more risk. It's all mecanical and rotating pieces ....

how effing much?

yeh I can really see our FD signing off on £20K for a tape drive to back up a bit more data on a slightly bigger tape. I'm sure that he'd react in most calm and reasonable manner as he stuffed the capex up my *rse.

why would you spend this much for 1TB?

why would anyone spend 37,000 on a tape system, when you could spend, iduno, a couple hundred bucks for a hdd? jeez. lets say a 1TB HDD costs $500 (which in reality it's MUCH less) you could get 74 HDDs for the same price, which more than counteracts the reliability issues with HDDs. stupid people.